Masters of Russian Animation Volume VII

1997 compilation

Rating: n/r

Plot: Three stop-animators and four pieces by Andrei Khrjanovsky.

I likely picked this up for the stop-animation, but I was bored by those three shorts. Michail Kamanetsky's "Wolf and Calf" and Vadim Kurchevsky's "My Green Crocodile" are both kiddie works with cute talking animals and bright colors. Nikolai Serebryakov's "Ball of Wool" is more of an animated fable for adults about greed. They're fine, but they're nothing I really care to ever think about again. It is likely the only time a movie will make me wonder what a sex scene between a crocodile and a cow would look like though. The four Khrjanovksy works are fantastic though. "There Lived Kozyavin" is a brutally absurd look at the work of an office peon who faithfully follows his boss's order to "Look for Sidrow" and winds up circling the globe. "Armoire" has the same sort of surreal imagery and subtle humor. Things get wackier with "King's Sandwich," a playful short with bizarre contraptions and grotesque characters that reminded me a lot of Sylvain Chomet's characters in Belleville. The real treat in this volume is "Glass Harmonica" in which Khrjanovsky plunders images from easily recognized works of art. It's the language of Dali's wet dreams and as hilarious as Bosch's The Last Judgement. I was left wondering how Mr. Khrjanovsky got away with all of this subversive art working in the Soviet Union. The twenty minutes that make up "Glass Harmonica" are the best animated twenty minutes I've seen in a long time.